HOW THE EARTH WAS PEOPLED. 681 



without decisive proofs. Moreover, the pithecans seem to have been 

 evolved in an inverse direction from man. Rejoicing in the heat, 

 they perish rapidly when brought into the temperate zones, and this 

 is especially the case with the anthropoid apes. Thus, while man, com- 

 ing from the north, advances toward the south only when the depres- 

 sion of temperature favors his progress in that direction, the monkeys, 

 to which a strong heat is a vital element, were developed in an age 

 when Europe had a sub-tropical climate, and disappeared from that 

 continent as soon as the climate became temperate, so that their de- 

 parture coincides with the arrival of man. They fled south to find the 

 heat they needed, precisely when the diminution of the heat opened to 

 man the region from which it excluded his predecessors. The neces- 

 sity of placing the cradle of the pithecans in a hot country enables us 

 to separate the monkeys of the Eastern and Western Continents into 

 two distinct groups marked by differences in dentition important 

 enough to oblige us to assume an extreme antiquity for their separa- 

 tion. Both are descended from the lemurians, now represented only 

 in Madagascar, but of which early tertiary fossils are found in Eu- 

 rope. The most recent lemurians in Europe are found at the end of 

 the Eocene. It is later, in the Miocene and that not the lowest, that 

 we meet pithecans similar to those of the equatorial zone of the East- 

 ern Continent. At this epoch, which was nearly that of Oeningen and 

 the Mollassic Sea, which divided Europe from east to west, a sub- 

 tropical climate still prevailed in the center of the continent, and the 

 palm-trees extended up into Bohemia, along the northern banks of the 

 great interior sea. By favor of this temperature the monkeys occu- 

 pied Europe to near the forty-fifth degree, but without going above 

 it, to disappear forever as soon as it became cool enough for men and 

 elephants. 



The Mesopithecus Pentelici, of which M. Gaudry has discovered 

 twenty-five individuals at Pikermi, was small, walked on its four paws, 

 and lived on twigs and leaves. The Dryopithecus of St. Gauclens had 

 the characteristics of the highest anthropomorphs, with the bestial 

 face of the gorilla ; but it is to this animal that M. Gaudry is inclined 

 to attribute the flints, intentionally chipped, according to the Abbe 

 Bourgeois, of the Beauce limestone at Thenay, in the St. Gaudens 

 geognostic horizon. The Pliopithecus of Sansan (Gers) resembles a 

 gibbon. To find the present analogues of the Pliopithecus and Dryo- 

 pithecus of Miocene Europe, it is necessary to go across the tropic of 

 Cancer to about 12 north latitude, or more than thirty degrees south 

 of the locality of these fossils. If, as is probable, the same interval 

 existed between the perimeter frequented by the European anthropo- 

 morphs and the natal region in which man was originally confined, we 

 shall find the latter in the latitude of Greenland, at 70 or 75. This 

 is indeed an hypothetical calculation, but it is based on a double argu- 

 ment hard to refute. 



